Volkswagen

The History of Post-War Germany in Script

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

This could be a pretty short story: A "V" atop a "W" in a round emblem. Pretty self-explanatory, right? About the only major changes in the last half century have been to place the chrome emblem on a black field. But there's more to this story than meets the eye: It's an emblem that encompasses Nazi Germany, but also some international intrigue, copyright law, and downright thievery in its history.
The logo seen on modern Volkswagens was--officially, at least--the product of a contest some time in the late 1930s. Employees were challenged to come up with a design, which was officially registered as a trademark by Franz Xaver Reimspiess by trademark application in 1938, but that's just for the stacked "V" and "W" letters. The later emblem, with the stacked letters in a Strahlenkranz or "radiant garland" was first displayed on wheel covers at the Berlin Auto Show in 1939.
Disagreements started almost immediately, and weren't resolved until 2005. A Swedish designer, Nikolai Borg, claimed that Volkswagen had stolen the logo, which it had commissioned from him in 1939. According to Borg's suit, the graphic artist had been commissioned in 1939 by the then Reich Minister Fritz Todt to prepare designs for the VW emblem. After a logo had been delivered, he was then strung along with the story that things were being postponed until after the "Final Victory." However, when Borg discovered his logo on a vehicle belonging to the Army in 1943, he began to feel he was being cut out.
Borg filed suit 60 years later, but his legal action against the Wolfsburg manufacturer was dismissed by the Vienna Business Court. The judges did not deny in any way that Borg had drawn up the design in the 1930s and had also delivered it as contracted. However, judges determined that the logo had existed for some time prior.
Volkswagens built before 1953 have also carried a second logo depicting the crest of the city of Wolfsburg, which had been known as KdF-Stadt ("Strength through Joy City") early in the Nazis' ascent to power. Following the war, the city was renamed after the nearby Wolf's Castle. Volkswagens carried the city crest (a castle with an open city gate and a wolf between its turrets, fronted by wavy lines representing the nearby Aller river.) Until 1953, this logo was in place on all Volkswagen products, but when the company began building cars in Brazil, it faded from prominence, until it was mostly eliminated after 1962. However, the badge kept coming back well into the 1980s on "Wolfsburg Edition" Golfs and Jettas.
The mark of any good crest, we suppose, is its allure to hoodlums. Volkswagen has achieved that honor most notably twice in its history. According to Giles Chapman's book Car Emblems, between 1957 and 1958, over a million emblems were stolen, resulting in over $3 million in losses. Then, in the U.K. between the years of 1986 and 1987, new Volkswagen emblems were stolen again and made into necklaces by fans of the Beastie Boys. During these years, Volkswagen had an unpublished policy of replacing the stolen emblems, and offering VW logo keychains as an enticement to Beastie Boys fans not to steal the emblems from cars.

This article originally appeared in the March, 2009 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.